You could be anywhere these days. I realized this as I wrote to you the first time. I hope you end up getting this somehow, just as I have with the other letters. You must be close. We’ll see each other soon.

For most of my life I’d considered you a concept, a creative invention for reconfiguring our understandings of the way things are. I thought you were like this even before your literal existence was discredited, before your relegation to the status of allegorical representation, or fevered dream of the West before the West .

The frontier has always sought you out, only to find itself in the end (and a perpetual denial of obsolescence). You remain a material reality despite this. Your persistence is fueled by necessity.